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Thursday, May 21, 2015

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS

‘Mad Men’ says good-
bye after seven seasons

TV REVIEW

Final Episode 

leaves unanswered 

questions

By CHLOE GILKE

Managing Arts Editor

Rest in peace, Don Draper.
During his last appearance in the 

“Mad Men” series finale, Don Drap-
er (Jon Hamm, “30 
Rock”) is at peace. 
His eyes are closed 
and his mouth rests 
in an uncharacter-
istic smile. The col-
lection of roles and 
jobs that bound him 
to his harsh New 
York lifestyle — husband, father, 
mentor and hotshot advertising 
executive — barely register on his 
still face. He is still alive and breath-
ing, but Don Draper is dead.

One of the major themes run-

ning throughout “Mad Men” is the 
malleability of identity. When Dick 
Whitman pulls the dog tags off his 
friend’s corpse and returns home 
from the Korean War with a new 
name, he’s abandoning the bag-
gage of his traumatic childhood and 
becoming, quite literally, another 
person. He is a chameleon, chang-
ing who he is to fit the demands 
of the new job and life he chooses 
for himself. And he is not the only 
one: The Peggy Olson (Elisabeth 
Moss, “The West Wing”) of Season 
7 couldn’t be more different from 
the demure and impressionable sec-
retary we met in the first episode. 
“Mad Men” allowed all of its char-
acters to change and shift course 
countless times during its seven-
season run — to rise, fall, relapse, 
live, die and come back again.

As her friendship with Don has 

cooled, Peggy is flourishing with 
independence. While Don runs 
away from all his problems, Peggy 
confronts hers head-on. She’s thriv-
ing at McCann Erickson, poised 
to become the next Don and even 
more. However, she still harbors a 
soft spot in her heart for the mentor 
who gave her the spark of hope for 
something more than secretarial 
work. And as distant as Don could 
be, his relationship with Peggy was 
one of his most genuine and mean-

ingful. In a despairing moment late 
in the episode, Don calls Peggy, 
remembering that he never said 
goodbye to her in person. He con-
fesses his sins: Hunched over the 
payphone with anguished eyes, 
mentor seeks comfort from men-
tee. Peggy reminds him that he has 
a home and a family to come back 
to — a work family, but that doesn’t 
make it any less real. Moss and 
Hamm deliver some of their best 
performances of the entire series, 
and the scene aches with the pathos 
of their shared desperation.

Immediately 
after 
this 
call, 

Peggy gets another from Stan Rizzo 
(Jay Ferguson, “The Lucky One”), 
who suddenly confesses his love 
to her. It’s a bizarre development, 
considering that their relationship 
always read as mutually respectful 
and supportive — never romantic. 
When Peggy realizes that she might 
have feelings for him, too, and he 
bursts into her office to kiss her, the 
scene is almost too good to be true. 
Historically, “Mad Men” has taken 
a cynical approach to love, and with 
so little evidence for Peggy and Stan, 
their passionate smooch comes off a 
bit too pat to be believable.

Don Draper doesn’t want to 

choose between work and life. He’s 
had his share of both — seven sea-
sons of brilliant advertising pitches 
and late nights in the office and 
a few months’ worth of aimless 
wandering and drunken brooding. 
When he arrives in Los Angeles 
and ends up at the hippie retreat, 
Don is already looking the part of 
Dick Whitman, wearing his hair 
in a boyish side part and donning 

some rugged denim jackets that 
are uncharacteristic of the ad exec 
persona he left behind in New York. 
But he outgrows those clothes at the 
retreat: He explores a new part of 
his identity entirely separate from 
Dick and Don. He has a sincere 
moment of connection with a man 
who describes feeling insubstan-
tial, more like a can in a refrigera-
tor than an actual human man with 
a wife and children who love him. 
Don knows this feeling of empti-
ness well. Despite the fact that he’s 
offered glimpses of vulnerability to 
his children and to Peggy, he won-
ders if there is even a man under 
the disguises he’s grown so used to 
wearing.

He buries Dick and Don in 

the California sand and emerg-
es a new man, eyes closed and 
legs crossed and meditating. 
He smiles, offering viewers a 
quick glimpse at the man he has 
become. Then the screen cuts 
to a Coca-Cola advertisement, 
which Don might have created if 
he went back to McCann Erick-
son.

The show doesn’t provide a 

definitive answer if he actually 
created the ad. All we are left 
with is the image of a peace-
ful smile and a group of people 
singing about love, harmony and 
human connection. It’s a beau-
tifully ambiguous ending to a 
show that always challenged its 
viewers to question and engage 
and to impart their own mean-
ing on every episode. Don is 
a blank slate and it’s up to us 
to determine his new identity.

A-

Mad Men 

Series Finale

AMC

MAD MEN

Mr. Draper will see you now.

‘Pitch Perfect’ 
sequel: off-key

By NOAH COHEN

Daily Arts Writer

Hold what you love to a high 

standard.

The acting, spearheaded by Anna 

Kendrick (“Up 
in the Air”) as 
the irresistibly 
not-so-alt Beca 
Mitchell, 
was 

charming 
and 

lighthearted. 
Kendrick 
hit 

her notes. The 
music 
was 

groovy. 
But 

“Pitch 
Perfect 

2” won’t make you feel happy like 
an old-time movie because the 
direction hit somewhere between 
amateurish and hand-me-a-drink 
awful, with insidious gags and hurt-
ful tropes suffocating the cast. First-
time feature director Elizabeth 
Banks went for the low-hanging 
fruit, and the film never found its 
sound. The project of “Pitch Per-
fect 2” presented weird and glori-
ous opportunities; we really needed 
Banks to step up here. Musical com-
edy deserves better than ironic cari-
catures.

The Bellas, our a cappella heroes, 

find themselves in a graphically 
embarrassing situation and spend 
the rest of the movie recovering. 
The long-term objective is clear-
ly outlined, and the once-again 
underdogs wander towards victory 
without serious conflict. A sense of 
community redeems our troupe. 
The message of power in voice and 
friendship is parodied and under-
mined by a giggling carelessness in 
execution. The supporting actress-
es’ identities are little more than 
running gags.

Rebel Wilson — playing “Fat 

Amy” — does her damnedest to 
make her character a complex per-
son. Her fearlessness in spite of 
scorn — both in-universe and from 
the audience — is phenomenal, but 
in her grand romantic denouement, 
she’s directed to present herself 
more as “Fat” than as “Amy”, as 
though overweight people’s rela-
tionships can never be more than a 
joke. Sure, the franchise gets points 
for including her at all, but it’s not 
a win when the primary cinematic 
value of a token character is ostensi-

bly their tokenhood.

This problem is redoubled in 

the case of the Black lesbian whose 
name we forget, the over-sexualized 
girl whose name we forget, the qui-
etly psycho Asian girl whose name 
we forget and the cute illegal immi-
grant girl whose name we forget, 
who constantly makes jokes about 
how horrifying life ACTUALLY 
IS for REAL PEOPLE in REAL 
PLACES in the REAL WORLD. And 
this is a light comedy? No, this is a 
dark comedy. You might not notice, 
because everyone is smiling and 
adorable. But damn, the darkness.

It’s 
Alanis-Morissette-ironic, 

dwelling in that coincidental pov-
erty of humor: the vagina flash, the 
lesbian hilariously turned on by 
sharing a tent with her straight girl-
friends, the Mexican student joking 
about deportation. But these sour 
notes can’t touch Kendrick, who 
carries the film. Kendrick’s inter-
actions with the German a capella 
group, Das Sound Machine, are 
deliciously awkward, touched with 
a confused sexual tension that has 
the audience cooing, and Keegan-
Michael Key owns every scene he’s 
a part of, his effervescence legiti-
mizing the absurd cameo of Snoop 
Dogg.

But the dramatic turns feel 

forced. There’s an underground 
pajama party staged just to give 
“Pitch Perfect 2” an opportunity 
to represent musically the way 
“Pitch Perfect” did, and even 
worse, when the Bellas go away 
to a camp to rediscover “their 
sound”, the atmosphere of the 
bonding is disappointingly low-
intensity, as though the director 
only noticed three-quarters of the 
way through the movie that the 
script saw insufficient conflict. 
The door of the film is left open for 
a sequel, but Kendrick’s intended 
replacement, Emily (Hailee Stein-
feld, “True Grit”) doesn’t have the 
stage presence to fill Kendrick’s 
shoes, despite Steinfeld’s organic 
puppy romance with the adork-
able Benji (Ben Platt, “Pitch Per-
fect”).

We adore this franchise, but 

we wanted the full wit and power 
of these ladies to leave us aca-
stounded. Even if the magic of 
the music glimmered through, the 
greater whole was a hot mess.

MOVIE REVIEW

C+

Pitch Per-
fect 2

At Quality 16 
and Rave 20

Universal Pictures

